The last two are somewhat different cases from the first two. MOSES UND ARON may technically be incomplete, as Schoenberg wrote the text for a third act that consisted of M & A arguing, then Aron dropping dead. He completed the first two acts and they work perfectly.

LULU was orchestrated up until about 1/4 of the way through the third act and the rest was complete in short score. Since the last scenes, in London, were basically reprises of already heard material, it was fairly easy for Cerha to re-construct the orchestration.

Both are incredible operas and I’m glad they get performed on the fringes of the standard rep; the City Opera Achim Freyer production of MOSES UND ARON in the early 90′s was one of the best nights I’ve ever had in an opera house.

WTF?

Given the quality of French pronunciation on major operatic stages, I would hazard to guess this is not as ‘simple’ as you suggest.

It is true that Verdi had some miserable experiences working at the Paris Opera, but that had little to do with the language and everything to do with the very different working conditions there: I believe he once (hyperbolically) complained that it took a meeting of the board of directors to decide whether the leading lady should gesture with her left hand or her right.

After Don Carlos failed at the Opera (despite some, not all, favorable reviews) Verdi allowed the work to be adapted for the Italian and international stage in an Italian language version. But this proves nothing one way or the other about Verdi’s preferences: Italian was the standard operatic language internationally (except for German-speaking countries). Therefore Faust, Carmen, Les Huguenots and even Lohengrin were best known worldwide in Italian translation until around the turn of the 20th century.

The du Locle-Méry libretto for Don Carlos is neither great poetry nor (in many places) great drama, but it has the distinct advantage of being written in a straightforward and literate style, without the many inversions and other distortions of syntax that litter the Italian translation. Budden chooses as a particularly telling example a line in the middle section of Elisabeth’s great aria. In French she sings:

“Fontainebleau! Mon coeur est plein de votre image!” [Fontainebleau! My heart is filled with your image.]

In Italian, this lovely line is gnarled into

“Fontainebleau! ver voi schiude il pensiero i vanni!” [Fontainebleau! Toward thee opens my thought the pinions.]

And no, “vanni” does not quite mean “wings” (not that Elisabeth even mentioned wings in the original). It’s a deliberate archaic usage, the kind of diction hack Italian librettists fell back on when they wanted to sound grand and old-timey.

Anyone who can sing a role in Don Carlo in Italian can sing the same role in Don Carlos in French: it’s simply a matter of learning the words. I am sure there was a time when a lot of baritones dragged their feet about relearning “Dio possente” from Faust, too, but they did it.

My suspicion is that these changes came with the decision to cast Garanca as the Muse/Nicklausse. And that there was some idea in Gelb & Levine’s heads to push the expansion of the Muse/Nicklausse as the story line for the new production (and push Garanca with it). Tommasini’s column would have been about Garanca and the music that had been revived for her. But when Garanca moved over to Carmen, that idea was dropped.

That parenthetical slam is nasty and unnecessary. This was one of the most important discoveries in Verdi studies by one of the people best-equipped to appreciate and elucidate its significance, and it does not deserve a snide remark.

Above, I didn’t mean all Italians spoke the dialect of Parma, Verdi did, but those born elsewhere spoke local dialects and usually French. Literary Italian was actually a foreign language to many. Da Ponte’s family for example spoke only a Judeo-Venetian dialect but after all converted, changing their family name to the name of the Bishop who converted them he, aged 11 (!) laboriously taught himself literary Italian so he could read Dante. However he did use a Venetian pronunciation with friends which turned harmless looking Italian works into double-entendres (Harnoncourt has a chart for Cosi, showing which words when twisted slightly become very dirty indeed, Guglielmo’s first act aria is evidently a riot of obscenity).

I believe the long opening chorus was first given in full at the Met. I could be wrong that Verdi cut this for the first performance in Bologna, I believe he did, but it did exist in an Italian translation. Earlier attempts at an Italian five act version either cut a big section of it, or omitted it.

My recollection is that Levine claimed to have included some not-heard-before music in the first act of the current Met’s production. (Vaguely remember it having to do with the chorus at the beginning of the Fontainebleau scene.)

He took his French librettos VERY seriously, criticizing the pro forma translation commissioned by the cheap Paris impresario who did the “French” Macbeth for its bad grammar and inelegant wording. Verdi set Vepres and Don Carlos carefully and in a masterly fashion, his music sits precisely and elegantly on the French words in both scores. His understanding of musical declamation in French (listen to the King’s aria in its original text)was second to none, including French born composers, several of whom were employed by the Paris Operas during the laborious preparations for Don Carlos (they included Delibes, who supervised the copying of parts).

The Italian translation of Don Carlos was/is a mess and he was unhappy about it, since it shifted the stresses in his setting to the wrong (weaker) words and is also much cruder than the French text. However, outside of France, there was more of a market for opera in Italian, so Verdi lived with the translation.

Is there a basis for saying that Verdi disliked the French language? Never heard that one before.

Of course, the Met has one (1) Francophone singer in its upcoming CARMEN, so perhaps they should be doing that in Italian as well?

I can’t cite chapter and verse but I do not think you are correct that Verdi preferred the Italian libretto for DON CARLO(S). Even worse is VESPRI, where the tenor addresses the soprano as “O donna” several times…

Of course, the Met has one (1) Francophone singer in its upcoming CARMEN, so perhaps they shpul;d be doing that in Italian as well?

I can’t cite chapter and verse but I do not think you are correct that Verdi preferred the Italian libretto for DON CARLO(S). Even worse is VESPRI, where the tenor addresses the soprano as “O donna” several times…